Costs

Prosecutors in separate capital cases in Indiana, Florida, and Texas have dropped pursuit of the death penalty in order to end notoriously lengthy delays and facilitate healing for the victims’ families. On March 8, 2019, St. Joseph County, Indiana prosecutors agreed to a plea deal instead of a third death-penalty trial for Wayne Kubsch (pictured) at the request of the victims’ family. Kubsch was initially sentenced to death in 2000 and received the death penalty a second time in 2005, but both times his triple-murder convictions was overturned. In announcing the plea agreement, St. Joseph County Prosecutor Kenneth Cotter said “[t[he family actually asked us to take the death penalty off. They wanted to remember their loved ones, not remember him every time he came back with another appeal.” Kubsch pled guilty and was sentenced to life without parole, agreeing to waive his right to appeal his sentence. “I'm 75 years old. I'll soon be 76. And we decided that the best thing would be life in prison, because that way we don't have all the appeals. We don't have all this to go through and the kids don't have to deal with this constantly,” said Diane Mauk, the mother of victim Beth Kubsch. Chief Deputy Prosecutor Eric Tamashasky said, "For the family, this gives them the closure that they’ve so desperately needed for 20 years.”

Prosecutors also decided to drop the death penalty to end lengthy pre-trial delays in cases in Florida and Texas. After eight years of proceedings in what news reports described as Hillsborough County’s “longest-running murder case that has yet to see trial,” Florida state attorneys announced on February 4 that they would no longer seek the death penalty against Michael Keetly. Keetly had been in pretrial detention for nearly 3,000 days. Keetly’s attorney, Lyann Goudie, said she had recently presented mitigating evidence to the prosecutors in an effort to persuade prosecutors that they were unlikely to obtain a unanimous vote for death, and had challenged the ballistic evidence and eyewitness identification the prosecution intended to present at trial. Following the prosecution’s decision, the case is now scheduled to go to trial in June. Todric Deon McDonald was charged with two counts of capital murder in McLennan County, Texas, more than four years ago. In 2018, with the case facing additional delays to permit the defense to prepare for a potential penalty phase, the victims’ families told prosecutors they supported withdrawing the death penalty if it meant the case would proceed to trial as scheduled. The prosecutors dropped the death penalty in August 2018 and jury selection began on February 11, 2019, after McDonald had spent 1,733 days in jail. McDonald was convicted three days later and sentenced to life without parole.

A death-penalty trial requires extensive pretrial preparation, because defense attorneys have to conduct an in-depth investigation into their client’s life history and mental health to present mitigating evidence in the event their client is convicted. The longer pretrial period is one of many reasons why death-penalty trials are significantly more expensive than trials in which a death sentence is not an option. There is also a lengthy appeals process if a defendant is sentenced to death, and at that point, the most likely outcome is that the conviction or death sentence will be reversed.

During his election campaign, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner described the economic wastefulness of city prosecutors' pursuit of the death penalty as "lighting money on fire." A DPIC analysis of the outcomes of the more than 200 death sentences imposed in the city since 1978 (click image to enlarge) and the last seven years of capital prosecution outcomes provides strong support for Krasner's claim. Data tracking the final dispositions of cases in which Pennsylvania prosecutors had provided notice of intent to seek the death penalty showed that between 2011 and 2017, 98.7% of the 225 cases in which Philadelphia prosecutors had sought the death penalty ended with a non-capital outcome. Similarly, 99.5% of the 201 death sentences imposed in the city—mostly in the 1980s and 1990s—have not resulted in an execution. Two thirds of the convictions or death sentences have already been reversed in the courts and 115 of the former death-row prisoners have since been resentenced either to life sentences (101) or a term of years (11) or been exonerated (3). The single execution was of a severely mentally ill man whom courts initially found incompetent to waive his rights, but was later permitted to be executed.

DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham announced the results of the DPIC analysis at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia at a news conference conducted by the death-row exonerees' organization Witness to Innocence. Dunham said that the data showed Philadelphia's pursuit of the death penalty has been "a colossally inefficient" waste of judicial resources and "a colossal waste of money."

Death sentences imposed in Philadelphia peaked in the first term of District Attorney Ronald Castille's administration in 1986-1989, when an average of 11.25 death sentences per year were imposed. 99 more death sentences were imposed in the decade of the 1990s. By 2001, 135 prisoners were on Philadelphia's death row, and the 113 African Americans on its death row were more than in any other county in the United States. Since then, death sentencing rates have plummetted, falling to 1.5 per year in 2006-2009, the final term of District Attorney Lynn Abraham's administration, and to fewer than one a year this decade, during the administration of Seth Williams. But even as the number of death sentences fell, the proportion of defendants of color sentenced to death in Philadelphia increased. In the past two decades, 82.6% of the defendants sentenced to death in Philadelphia have been African American. Of the 46 defendants sentenced to death in Philadelphia since 1997, 44 (95.7%) have been defendants of color.

Krasner's campaign pledge not to use the death penalty, Dunham said, was a "natural conclusion" of the steep decline in death penalty usage in the city.

A Nebraska county has raised property taxes on its residents and asked the state legislature for a bailout to help pay a $28.1 million civil judgment it owes to six men and women wrongly convicted of rape and murder after having been threatened with the death penalty. The so-called“Beatrice Six” (pictured) successfully sued Gage County for official misconduct that led to their wrongful convictions in the 1985 rape and murder of Helen Wilson. The large damages award exceeds Gage County's entire annual budget by $1 million. This year, Gage County Supervisors passed a property tax increase of 11.76 cents per $100 of valuation—the maximum increase allowed without putting the issue to voters. The tax increase is expected to generate about $3.8 million next year, but county leaders worry about its impact on residents and have announced plans to ask lawmakers and Governor Pete Ricketts for state funding or a loan to help pay the civil judgment. Greg Lauby, a former attorney who organized residents to seek solutions to the problem, said, “If we continue on the path we’re on with no assistance from the state, it will drive at least some farmers to bankruptcy. We have homeowners who are struggling to put food on their table and clothe their children, and that’s an amount that will make a difference.”

Five of the Beatrice Six exonerees—James Dean, Kathy Gonzalez, Debra Shelden, Ada JoAnn Taylor, and Tom Winslow—agreed to plea bargains or pled no contest after prosecutors threatened them with the death penalty. A sixth, Joseph E. White, maintained his innocence, but was convicted at trial based on false testimony about his alleged involvement in the crime. The six were exonerated by DNA evidence in 2008 after spending a combined 70 years in prison. The damages were awarded by a federal jury in 2016, just months before Nebraska voters passed a referendum to overturn the legislature's 2015 abolition of the death penalty and reinstate capital punishment. The county is responsible for the payment because prosecutors are immune from liability for wrongful convictions, and the sheriff involved in the case died in 2012. State Senator Ernie Chambers—one of the leaders of the death-penalty repeal efforts—said he opposes a state bailout. “This was strictly a county matter,” Chambers said. “They made their bed, now they have to sleep in it.” He added that, despite widespread coverage of the exonerations, Gage County voters overwhelmingly supported the reinstatement of the death penalty in 2016. “They haven’t learned a thing,” he said. Ultimately, as the McCook (Nebraska) Gazette wrote in an October 8, 2018 editorial, “[t]he Beatrice Six case and others like it spotlight the need to elect ethical and competent sheriffs and county attorneys and hold them accountable.”

An Arizona appeals court judge has urged the state's supreme court to rule that the death penalty violates Arizona's state constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In an August 16, 2018 opinion dissenting from the Arizona Supreme Court's affirmance of death-row prisoner Jason Bush's conviction and sentence, Court of Appeals Judge Lawrence Winthrop (pictured)—sitting by designation in the case because of the recusal of one of the high court's justices—wrote that "[t]he death penalty not only inflicts unnaturally cruel punishment, but the application and implementation of the death penalty is, at best, arbitrary and capricious." According to Judge Winthrop, the dangers of wrongful convictions and death sentences, systemic "flaws in administering the death penalty, and our historic inability to devise a method to implement the death penalty free from human bias and error" require that the death penalty be declared unconstitutional. His opinion catalogued a range of problems in Arizona's application of capital punishment, including racial bias, wrongful convictions, and geographic disparities. The death penalty, he also wrote, "has been shown to ... impose unintended trauma on the victim’s family and friends, and to be cost prohibitive. ... [G]iven the continued reports that demonstrate defendants may be sentenced to death because of jurors’ inherent bias, and studies that demonstrate the death penalty has no identifiable deterrent effect, the answer to the question of whether the cost of the death penalty outweighs the societal benefit is a resounding, 'No.'” Judge Winthrop's dissent echoes many of the themes of—and frequently quotes from—U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's dissent in Glossip v. Gross (2015), which questioned whether the death penalty, as applied today, violates the U.S. Constitution. "We simply can no longer ignore the seemingly inherent variants and problems associated with implementing the death penalty," Judge Winthrop wrote. "To continue to affirm the enforcement the death penalty, given what we now know, is to approve a punishment that is both cruel and unusual." The court majority in Bush's case upheld his conviction and death sentence, rejecting a variety of arguments that the trial and sentencing were constitutionally flawed. The majority "express[ed] no opinion ... [on] the validity of capital punishment under Arizona’s Constitution," reserving that judgment for a case in which "the issue [were properly] raised, developed, and argued." However, Bush's case, they wrote, was "not the appropriate case to address or decide" that issue.

Calling the death penalty a wasteful "big government" policy that is "inept, biased, and corrupt," a libertarian think tank and a New Orleans columnist have joined the chorus of conservative voices calling for the end of the death penalty. In Conservative doesn't mean supporting death penalty, New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Tim Morris (pictured) argues that being a conservative requires neither "an unyielding fealty to a party or person [or] simply finding the polar opposite of some liberal position," and that while he believes that "capital punishment can be morally justified," "our government has proven to be ... inept, biased and corrupt in carrying out that responsibility." Likewise, in a July 22, 2018 commentary, If You Hate Big Government, You Should Oppose the Death Penalty, published on the Foundation for Economic Education website, Patrick Hauf writes that "[f]rom fiscal irresponsibility to wrongful convictions to botched executions, the death penalty is merely another wasteful government effort." Hauf, too, criticizes what he sees as reflexive support for the death penalty among some conservatives. While many "pride themselves on their unapologetic use of the death penalty, its enactment," Hauf says, "like most government programs, is both inefficient and ineffective." Morris, whom the newspaper describes as an “independent thinker with a Christian worldview and a journalist’s sense of skepticism,” dismisses the notion that all conservatives must support the death penalty. As evidence that government cannot properly administer capital punishment, he says "too many innocent people are being sentenced to death" and notes that 82 percent of death-row cases in Louisiana from 1975-2015 ended with the conviction or sentence being reversed. In another op-ed, he cites findings from a University of North Carolina study that a black male in Louisiana is 30 times more likely to be sentenced to death if the victim was a white female than when the victim was a black male. After detailing the reasons conservative political strategist Richard Viguerie and Pulitzer prize winning conservative columnist George Will also oppose capital punishment, Morris sums up: “the death penalty is arbitrary, racially discriminatory, and doesn't deter crime. I don't see anything conservative about supporting an inept, biased, corrupt system." Hauf also tauts growing Republican resistance to the death penalty, citing a 2017 report by Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty that highlighted a dramatic rise in Republican sponsorship of bills to abolish capital punishment and the results of a Gallup poll that reported 10-percentage-point decrease in support for the death penalty among conservatives in 2017. He notes the ideological inconsistency between principled conservatism and the death penalty, saying capital punishment is "one issue where conservatives often give far too much power to the government." He writes, "many Republicans allow their 'tough on crime' mentality to overrule limited government ideals and innate skepticism of state overreach. This contradiction within the Republican platform, although rarely acknowledged, exposes a weakness in the party’s ideology. If Republicans pride themselves on their limited government philosophy, then why would they grant the government control over life and death?" There is, he concludes, "nothing 'small government' about capital punishment. ... It’s time for Republicans to kill capital punishment off for good."

A joint committee of the Kentucky legislature conducted a hearing on July 6, 2018 on the Commonwealth's rarely used death penalty, including a presentation by supporters and opponents of a bill to abolish capital punishment. The General Assembly's Interim Joint Committee on Judiciary took testimony from prosecutors, defense attorneys, correctional officials, and legislators on issues ranging from costs and arbitrariness to the length of the appeal process. Though Kentucky currently has 31 prisoners on death row, and prosecutors across the Commonwealth have filed 52 notices of intent to seek a death sentence, only three people have been executed since 1976. The last execution took place in 2008, and only one death sentence has been imposed in the last five years. Rep. Jason Nemes (R-Louisville), one of the sponsors of a House bill to abolish the death penalty, told the committee, "Kentucky should get out of the business of killing its citizens – period." Criticizing capital punishment based on his pro-life and small government views, Nemes noted that more than 150 people have been exonerated since the 1970s after having been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S., and 49 out of the 97 death sentences imposed in Kentucky have already been overturned. "We don’t believe the government can adequately fill potholes," Nemes said. "And if we don’t believe the government can do that perfectly, then why should we give it the power to do that which is irreversible?" Senate Minority Leader Ray S. Jones (D-Pikeville) said that infrequent executions erode whatever deterrent effect the death penalty might have. Instead, he said, the death penalty creates a "false hope of closure." Rep. John Blanton (R-Salyersville), a retired Kentucky State Police officer and an execution proponent, responded, “[t]he problem is not the death sentence, the problem is the length of time we allow these people to look for everything under the sun." "Let's speed up the process," he said. The Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy estimates the cost of the death penalty to Kentucky taxpayers at about $10 million per year. Executions have been on hold in the Commonwealth since 2010, when a state judge placed an injuction halting all executions while courts reviewed the lethal injection protocol. Andrew English, general counsel for the Justice Cabinet, said the Department of Corrections has attempted to "rewrite the regulations to achieve conformity with the court rulings," but that "[t]here’s an ever-evolving change in the landscape when it comes to federal and state courts, with the death penalty." Kentucky, like other states, has encountered problems with determining what drugs are appropriate and available for use in executions.

A Colorado Springs jury rejected a death sentence for Glen Law Galloway (pictured), marking the third high-profile case since 2015 in which Colorado jurors have selected a life sentence over death. The verdict brought to an end El Paso County’s first capital prosecution in more than a decade, after a six-week trial in a courtroom with a $50,000 makeover that included new audio and video technology and a remodeled jury box enlarged to accommodate six alternate jurors. 2,800 potential jurors had received summonses to appear for service in the case. Prosecutors unsuccessfully attempted to portray Galloway as an unrepentent and remorseless killer who, in the words of El Paso District Attorney Dan May, had committed “two horrific homicides.” They claimed that Galloway had killed a homeless man, Marcus Anderson, to steal his truck and silence him as a witness, and then drove it to the house of his ex-girlfriend, Janice Nam, where he killed her to exact revenge for a stalking conviction. The jurors found Galloway guilty of premeditated murder in Nam's killing, but determined that Anderson’s murder had not been premeditated and acquitted Galloway of aggravated robbery, rejecting the prosecution’s contention that he had killed Anderson to steal his truck. The same defense team that represented Aurora movie-theater shooter James Holmes presented more than thirty witnesses in four days of testimony about Galloway’s character and background, describing to the jury how the former Army veteran “snapped” following the detoriation of his relationship with Nam. Defense attorneys presented mitigating evidence on Galloway's harsh upbringing and his life in the Army, followed by a career in microchip manufacturing. Denver public defender Daniel King, one of Galloway's attorneys, said Galloway was an otherwise law-abiding person who tragically lost control. “Mr. Galloway is not just the worst thing that he’s done,” King said. “He’s committed many acts of kindness, friendship, service, love and duty.” After five hours of deliberation, the jury found that the mitigating evidence in the case outweighed aggravating evidence and sentenced Galloway to life. Colorado juries had previously rejected death sentences for Holmes, who killed twelve people in a mass shooting, and Dexter Lewis, who fatally stabbed five people in a Denver bar. “Once again, a jury has told the government that seeking the death penalty is a waste of everyone’s time,” said Phil Cherner, a retired attorney and chairman of the board for Coloradans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. Colorado has not imposed a death sentence since 2010, and has not executed a prisoner since 1997. Governor John Hickenlooper declared a moratorium on executions in 2013.

At the urging of the victim’s family, Rapid City, South Dakota prosecutors have withdrawn their request for the death penalty against two murder defendants in the only capital trials pending in the state. On April 16, Pennington County State’s Attorney Mark Vargo withdrew the state’s notice of intent to seek the death penalty against Jonathon Klinetobein—charged with arranging the May 2015 murder-for-hire of his ex-girlfriend, Jessica Rehfeld—after her father, Michael Rehfeld told the court the family no longer wanted the death penalty to be imposed. On April 19, prosecutors also withdrew their notice of intent against a second defendant, Richard Hirth, the accused killer. A third defendant pleaded guilty to the murder in January in exchange for receiving a life sentence. Mr. Rehfeld said that he had been “consumed with anger” at the time the capital charges were initially sought and that he had “fully supported” that decision. However, he said, with time, he had reconsidered his position. Mr. Rehfeld said the lengthy appeal process following the imposition of a death sentence in the case would keep his daughter’s killers in the news, permitting “the guilty to become famous,” as a prolonged traumatic courtroom saga that relegated his daughter to a sidelight prevented the family from healing. He also said that the family would be unable to recover his daughter’s personal belongings—including a cellphone with the last pictures taken of her—as long as the case remained on appeal. Klinetobein and Hirth now face life without parole if convicted. Victims’ family members, concerned that the capital trial and appeals process interferes with or delays healing, are increasingly requesting that prosecutors not pursue the death penalty. A University of Minnesota study found that just 2.5% of victims’ family members reported achieving closure as a result of capital punishment, while 20.1% said the execution did not help them heal. Another study, published in the Marquette Law Review, found that family members in homicide proceedings in which the death penalty was unavailable or had not been imposed were physically, psychologically, and emotionally more healthy and expressed greater satisfaction with the legal system than family members in death-penalty cases. Pennington County Commission Chairman Lloyd LaCroix said the decision to withdraw the death penalty would save the county money, although he was uncertain how much. In September 2017, the commissioners granted requests by the county courts and the public defender’s office for half-million-dollar increases to their 2018 budgets. The director of the public defender’s office had previously estimated that taxpayers could "reasonably expect" to pay between $500,000 and $1 million in prosecution and defense costs for the cases. Rapid City last imposed a death sentence in 1993. Charles Rhines' appeals in that case reached the U.S. Supreme Court before being sent back for additional appeals that are still in progress.